Rick Hill is the Valero Alamo Bowl’s VP of Marketing and Communications. Prior to the bowl, Rick spent 6 years working for the Spurs, one season with Missions Baseball and two fruitless months trying to sell season tickets for the S.A. Riders.

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Blue Dot Ticket Special

Every couple hours since the Valero Alamo Bowl announced our 2013 match-up of Oregonvs. Texas on December 8 (hard to believe that’s only 10 days ago) I’ve had at least one person ask, “So how many tickets you got left?” or “Are you soldout yet?”

My quick answers are “we still have tickets available” and “Nope” like they are every year.

The 2013 Valero Alamo Bowl will be our third straight capacity crowd and sixth in the last eight years. However, we’ve never issued a press release saying “soldout” even though most of those games only had scattered single seats available for sale.

That policy goes back to the year when we unexpectedly received some last minute tickets back for a hot game. They didn’t sell because everyone thought the game was soldout. Now we don’t announce sellouts until kickoff.

However, the demand for this game is so high we may not have a single seat available for purchase by the time the teams come to town on Christmas Day. Our average ticket price sold through the bowl office before team announcement was $86. Now the average secondary market sale price is $213. I wish my 401k delivered that kind of return.

So if we are that close to capacity how many tickets do we have left? That’s a question we don’t like to answer as then people want a daily update of where we stand.

To help with that question and respond to all the social media asks for free tickets, we are offering a free pair of lower level tickets and pregame party passes! The tickets are in the last row of the lower level and the pregame tickets get you into our our all-you-care-to-eat-and-drink party at Sunset Station.

Here’s all you need to do: Predict how many tickets will be available for our game on Ticketmaster.com as of 5 p.m. this Friday.

To make a more educated guess, take advantage of Ticketmaster’s interactive seat map. You can hover over each section and count the open seats (blue dots) in each section. The red ones are resale so click that tab off as previosuly sold ones don’t count.

Then submit your guess as a comment on our Facebook or Instagram post with the full field flag by 5 p.m. Thursday (tomorrow). We will randomly pick one winner from the closest five guesses. So to clarify: you are commenting your guess by 5 p.m. tomorrow how many you tickets think will be available by 5 p.m. Friday.